CASTL

Making Teaching Visible at Carleton

As submitted in March 2006

 

1. INTRODUCTION. Why do you want to participate in the CASTL Leadership Program; what goals will participation accomplish and in what ways will your institution be a leader?

Through participation in the CASTL Leadership Program, Carleton hopes to build a higher campus profile for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning as a set of natural, credible, and intentional ways to assess faculty effectiveness and student learning. In order to fulfill this main goal successfully, we need first to encourage faculty to report and archive their pedagogies (making teaching visible); second, to develop and implement a variety of classroom assessment strategies; and third, to undertake specific SoTL projects by engaging both faculty and students in this research. Carleton is well-positioned to achieve these goals (and the others described below) because of ongoing institutional assessment strategies (coordinated through the Office of Institutional Research); active faculty-driven cross-disciplinary initiatives that include writing, quantitative inquiry, arts, visuality, ethics, information literacy/research skills, and interdisciplinary science; and other institutional resources, including the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching (LTC) and the Science Education Resource Center (SERC). We also see the CASTL Leadership Program as an excellent way to strengthen connections with the Carnegie Foundation that we have established through the Integrative Learning Project and other channels.

We intend to strengthen collaborations with St. Olaf College through our work in the Leadership Program. Substantive academic ties between the two institutions have increased in the last several years as the result of collaborative library projects, funded by the Mellon Foundation. In spring 2005, the colleges collaborated in co-leadership of a national conference on “Innovations in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the Liberal Arts Colleges.” The Center for Innovation in the Liberal Arts (CILA) at St. Olaf and the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching at Carleton will again host the “Innovations” conference in spring 2007. Looking beyond 2007, we expect the biennial conference will rotate among other liberal arts colleges, coordinated by a planning group that we expect to convene with the assistance of Charlie Blaich at Wabash College. The colleges also cooperate in efforts to develop new opportunities for academic civic engagement.

Apart from the collaborative work on the “Innovations” conference, we expect to promote the use of our campuses jointly as sites for Scholarship of Teaching and Learning research projects. Carleton and St. Olaf, both highly selective liberal arts colleges, draw students from different pools and offer two sets of examples for a variety of investigations. Our cooperation will double the possible audience for the SoTL results and open possibilities for undergraduate research projects on SoTL at both campuses, particularly in the social sciences. Carleton faculty aim to broaden opportunities for undergraduate research beyond the natural science departments, and we see SoTL projects as an excellent way to achieve this goal. On both campuses, there is an untapped resource of institutional survey results that can be made available to faculty and students within the constraints of privacy and confidentiality.

We will also use regional and national collaborations to further the CASTL Leadership Program goals. Both Carleton and St. Olaf are active in the Collaboration for the Advancement of College Teaching and Learning. The Mellon Foundation is providing funding for Carleton, Macalester, and Grinnell to explore methods and partnerships for teaching Arabic. Carleton and Macalester College share on-going grant support from the Mellon Foundation to support faculty development initiatives in teaching and learning. Carleton, St. Olaf, Macalester, and Grinnell College are partners in a grant from the Teagle Foundation to define student learning outcomes and evaluate assessment instruments in four areas: effective writing, global understanding, quantitative reasoning, and critical thinking. Carleton, St. Olaf, and Macalester, supported by a grant from the Lumina Foundation, are also participating in a four-year study of the impact of college on student learning, as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) tool. Building on its involvement in the AAC&U/Carnegie Integrative Learning Project, Carleton has welcomed the opportunity to cooperate with and learn from nine other institutions.

Carleton’s readiness to take on a leadership role is shown by a high level of administrative and technical support for this initiative. The Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, established in 1992 and supported by endowed funds, has ongoing programs of faculty mentoring, collaborative projects (such as the “Reflections” volume, edited by Singer and Rutz), regular conversations about issues in higher education, and weekly programs that showcase faculty curricular initiatives ranging from individual assignments to campus-wide programs. The Perlman Center coordinator administers the Mellon Faculty Life Cycles grant, which is one of a number of sources of funds that would be available to faculty proposing SoTL projects under the CASTL program. The LTC Website will be the place where results from the CASTL initiative can be archived. Another important campus resource includes the staff of the Office of Institutional Research, particularly Jackie Lauer-Glebov, Assistant Director of Institutional Research and Assessment Coordinator, and Dana Buddenbaum, Research and Assessment Analyst. This office administers and archives institutional surveys with data of immense use to SoTL projects; the office also works with faculty on assessment of student learning embedded in a wide range of campus initiatives. We have an active Institutional Review Board which has clear procedures for research with human subjects. Carleton’s Science Education Resource Center, a pioneer in making pedagogical resources available through the web, is already and will continue to be a strong partner in making visible the work of faculty, including SoTL projects. Among its other projects, SERC and the LTC are partnering on an NSF Digital Library project to document and disseminate innovative assignments designed by Carleton faculty. The first element of this digital library project involves assignments created and revised by 20 Carleton faculty members during December 2005 workshops co-sponsored by the Writing Program, the Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning and Knowledge Initiative, the Library, and Instructional Technology Services on “Writing with Numbers” and “Start Seeing Numbers.”

More generally, Carleton faculty engage on a regular basis in activities that support teaching and learning in the entire campus community. In the last several years, upwards of a hundred faculty members have participated in multi-day workshops during December and summer academic breaks. In the words of our Dean, Scott Bierman (writing about the effects of the LTC): “The bottom line is that we have become a collective faculty that regularly, deeply, and thoughtfully discusses effective methods for learning and teaching rather than just a disjointed set of departments carrying out, often impromptu, conversations in isolation. It turns out that this difference matters a lot.”

Finally, a number of Carleton faculty are already engaged in SoTL projects, including work formally supported by the Carnegie Foundation (Trish Ferrett’s study on integrative learning in interdisciplinary first-year science seminars is her Carnegie Scholar project). In Biology (Susan Singer, Debby Walser-Kuntz, and Sarah Deel), there is published and ongoing faculty research on student learning in introductory courses with a problem-solving and/or integrative focus. Carleton’s fifth grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is supporting a new study on integrative learning in science and math courses and seminars for first-term college students. An even larger number of Carleton faculty have done SoTL projects within the context of externally-funded campus initiatives (Writing Program, Quantitative Literacy, etc.) with a focus on integrating student learning goals with curriculum design and assessment. Though much of this work remains unpublished, faculty are “ramping up” on SoTL work. With some gentle coordination and support within a growing community of SoTL scholars, Carleton is primed to move SoTL work to the next level. Trish Ferrett and Susan Singer have agreed to use what they have learned in their own SoTL research and interaction with the Carnegie Foundation and others to help support a collegial community of practice for SoTL scholars at Carleton.

2. THEME. To which scholarship of teaching and learning institutional theme (see descriptions below) will you contribute, and what will you bring to this aspect of the work and the movement?

Carleton’s proposal fits best into the Liberal Learning track of the CASTL program. Carleton expects to contribute especially through our experience with an array of allied cross-disciplinary initiatives sketched out below.

1. Sophomore writing portfolio and its multiple uses in assessing student learning (writing skills, quantitative reasoning, critical thinking, interdisciplinary inquiry skills) and in identifying faculty development needs related to the assessment areas.

2. Cross-cutting literacies and skills, and exploration of ways to define and measure these, tied into ongoing curriculum discussion:

· Writing and communication (Writing Program and faculty development)

· Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge Initiative (QuIRK)

· Program in Ethical Inquiry

· Carleton’s participation in Carnegie’s Integrative Learning Project

· Teagle/Lumina initiative with focus on assessing writing, critical thinking, quantitative/analytical reasoning, and global understanding

· Visuality working group (visual literacy, visual modeling)

· Information literacy/research skills

· Course management systems, portfolios of student work.

3. Faculty-driven initiatives centered around disciplinary divisions:

· Carleton Interdisciplinary Science and Math Initiative (CISMI) (integrative and interdisciplinary inquiry skills)

· Humanities planning group with a focus on building a community for faculty scholarship and interdisciplinary work

· Arts planning group under the theme of the “Consciously Creative Campus.”

4. Institutional assessment through accreditation reviews, the College’s Educational Curriculum Committee subcommittees, and the need to have information from faculty and students to feed into these reviews.

5. Curriculum review discussions ongoing at Carleton related in part to a recent faculty vote to reduce from a six- to a five-course teaching load in several years.

6. Completed and on-going formal and informal SoTL projects (see above).

7. Surveys administered by or through Carleton’s Office of Institutional Research: freshman survey, senior survey, alumni survey, CSEQ questionnaire, department surveys.

3. IMPACT AND ASSESSMENT. What impact will result from participation; how will it be documented, evaluated?

The main impact for Carleton will result from tighter coordination of a number of activities—scholarly and curricular—that affect the campus climate for the scholarship of teaching. By harnessing the SoTL efforts and the faculty development opportunities afforded by curricular grants in writing, quantitative reasoning, and interdisciplinary science, we can begin to collect faculty reports of activities and pedagogies resulting from these curricular initiatives. We will also be able to collect the student learning results from these initiatives to share with other faculty members both at Carleton and St. Olaf.

The new assessment efforts will enliven a program of ongoing assessments of teaching and learning that are firmly in place: the sophomore writing portfolio (which fulfills a graduation requirement and offers a site for program evaluation for various learning goals); regularly scheduled national surveys of students and alumni; the Teagle/Lumina project that will test and evaluate assessments for four learning goals; regular assessments conducted by Carleton’s Education and Curriculum Committee; a self-study for an accreditation visit by a team from the North Central Association in 2008; and scheduled department and program reviews, which include an external review component.

4. PRODUCTS. What products will result from participation; how will they be disseminated?

Internal products include improved web sites for advisors, new faculty, and others who will need access to new approaches and expectations; and sharing of research and scholarship in programming coordinated by the Perlman Center for Teaching and Learning. The faculty-written volume Reflections on Learning as Teachers will be succeeded by a third volume tentatively entitled Building Intellectual Community, which will describe collaborations among

Carleton colleagues, faculty and students, faculty and staff, and among institutions as well.

Externally, products will include publications in appropriate venues, conference presentations, and sponsorship of special events, especially the 2007 Conference on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, which Carleton will co-sponsor with St. Olaf College. Geoscience products will be shared via Carleton’s Science Education Resource Center, a national resource that is a repository of scholarship on geoscience teaching and learning. The site has 9,000 serious users who visit more than six times per year; the site was visited by 900,000 users in 2005.

REFERENCES

AAC&U News, “Portfolios Transform Writing Assessment at Carleton College,” December 2004. http://aacu-secure.nisgroup.com/aacu_news/AACUNews04/December04/feature.cfm.

Carol Rutz with Jacqulyn Lauer-Glebov, “Assessment and Innovation: One Darn Thing Leads to Another.” Assessing Writing 10.2 (2005), 80-99.

Carol Rutz with Scott Bierman, Elizabeth Ciner, Jacqulyn Lauer-Glebov, and Mary Savina. “Integrative Learning: Coherence out of Chaos.” Peer Review, Summer/Fall 2005, 18-20.

Carol Rutz with Clara Hardy and Bill Condon, “WAC for the Long Haul: A Tale of Hope,” WAC Journal 13 (2002): 7-16.

Carol Rutz with Susan Singer, eds. Reflections on Learning as Teachers. Northfield: College City Press, 2004.

Susan Singer, with Walser-Kuntz, D; Deel, S. “Closing the Gap in Introductory Biology Learning: Effect of Problem Solving Sessions.” Proceedings of the Innovations in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning at the Liberal Arts Colleges, St. Olaf College, Northfield, MN 2005.

Kathie Galotti with Elveton, R. O.; Komatsu, L. K.; Rand, M. S.; Singer, S. R. “Origins and Mind: An Integrated Academic Experience for New Students.” Liberal Education, 2000,

86: 32-40.

Tricia Ferrett with Anthony, S., Why does the ozone hole form? An introductory ChemConnections module for College Chemistry (revision of 1998 Wiley version), instructor and student manuals, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005.

Tricia Ferrett with Anthony, S.; Bender, J., What should we do about global warming? An introductory ChemConnections module for College Chemistry, student manual, New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2004.

Tricia Ferrett’s Carnegie Scholars Project, February 2006 Project Snapshot, “Integrative Flashes of Student Insight in a First-Year Seminar on Abrupt Changes in Global Climate and Human Conception,” http://sakai.cfkeep.org/html/snapshot.php?id=65610686378191.

Liz Ciner “A Major Decision.” Advising and Learning: Academic Advising from the Perspective of Small Colleges and Universities, Martha K. Hemwall and Kent C. Trachte, eds. NACADA Mongraph Series, 2003, 8: 25-30.

Cathy Manduca and others, Bringing Research on Learning to the Earth Sciences: A Workshop Report, Dave Mogk, Montana State University, Cathy Manduca, Carleton College and SERC, Neil Stillings, Hampshire College. Final report at:

http://serc.carleton.edu/files/research_on_learning/ROL0304_2004.pdf, 36 p.

Science Education Resource Center (SERC) websites related to SoTL:

Assessment: http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/assessment/index.html.

Introductory Geoscience: http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/index.html.

Cutting Edge Workshop: Observing and Assessing Student Learning:

http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/assess/index.html.

Designing an Earth System Course:

http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/earthcoursedesign/index.html.